Hague Court Orders Retrial for 2 Aides to Milosevic

PARIS — United Nations appeals judges on Tuesday ordered a new trial for two top aides of former President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, saying that they had been wrongfully acquitted in 2013.

The appeals panel said that the judges in the original case had made legal errors and misinterpreted international law.

The panel barred the two men from returning to Serbia and ordered them to be detained at the court’s prison in The Hague.

It was a rare moment in the two-decades-old criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The court, created by the United Nations Security Council, has seen many defendants convicted and others acquitted and several have died or took their lives in prison. But it has only once before had to retry a case.

The two former Milosevic aides, Jovica Stanisic, the former chief of the Serbian secret police, and Franko Simatovic, his deputy, who opted to travel to The Hague for the hearing, had entered the courtroom on Tuesday looking confident. But they seemed taken aback by the verdict, lowering their heads as the decision was read out.

During the 1991-95 war that broke up Yugoslavia, the two men were among the country’s most powerful figures, and prosecutors had called them pivotal players in Mr. Milosevic’s strategy of seizing lands for Serbs and violently driving non-Serbs from large stretches of neighboring Bosnia and Croatia.

Their three-year trial in The Hague laid bare much of the inner workings of the Milosevic era, during which the government often trusted the secret police more than the military. The two men ran covert operations, including training and deploying paramilitary combat units that terrorized and killed civilians as they moved from village to village, often ahead of the military, looting and burning homes and mosques and forcing tens of thousands of people to flee.

The judges in the original trial acknowledged that many murders and other crimes resulted from that campaign. But the judges acquitted both police commanders, saying there was not enough evidence that they had issued “specific directions” to commit crimes, or that they were part of a “joint criminal enterprise,” the tribunal’s term for criminal conspiracy.

The unexpected acquittal drew intense criticism from legal experts and from survivors of the wars in Bosnia and Croatia.

A majority of the judges on the appeals panel, led by the presiding judge, Fausto Pocar of Italy, said they had found errors in law on crucial points. For example, they said that to find someone liable for aiding and abetting crimes, international law did not require proof of “specific directions” to commit crimes.

Judge Pocar said that the earlier finding was in “direct conflict” with prevailing jurisprudence. He said the panel could not send the case back to the original chamber because two of the judges were no longer there.

The chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, said that he was “satisfied with the outcome, because we had asked for a conviction or a retrial.” He said that the question of “specific direction” was fundamental. He and others have said that maintaining that element could make it nearly impossible to establish liability in the case of large-scale crimes where those responsible are leaders or commanders who often do not issue written orders and are likely to be far from the scene.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Hague Court Orders Retrial for 2 Aides to Milosevic. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe